Monday, August 07, 2017

Decoherence

There's a choice of scrambled eggs or strawberry cheesecake for breakfast. I deliberate.According to seventeenth century English thinker ThomasHobbes, that's exactly what I am doing: de-liberating.For in Hobbes's view we are only truly free at the moment of choice, not in the making of it. As Keanu Reeves said in a recent BBC interview, 'It's quantum baby'.This take on freedom mingles well with my own notion that one should try to juggle one's worldviews. In other words, as far as possible, one's political cats should remain both dead and alive, for that is the only way that they are also going to be free.So, while one might think that taking up a firm and radical position out on the ideological fringe makes one look handily both conspicuous and coherent — to follow the analogy — instead the tendency is to de-cohere.